It’s when I watch her sleep that the craziest fantasies come to me. My friend (that’s how I think of her in private) could become a goddess, I think. I could raise her to divine standing; that’s something the immortals (fanciful figures beloved by the Greeks, thought to have eternal life) used to do all the time. She could become my consort. Common-law wife, concubine, whatever you like; freed, you understand, from having to expire—a fix that technically speaking is a snap. Instead of running around stealing crucifixes or stuffing herself with Sicilian cannoli, she’d be by my side, or trekking around the galaxies. She’d fit in fine: I can easily imagine her here, her and those pigtails. Instead of microbes, she’d study meteorite fragments, or some cosmic scientific enigma. There’s material enough to nourish her mathematical soul for eternity, and slowly her knowledge would surpass mine (as it were). At some point she might decide to set down a giant summary bible, a compendium that would be admired to the end of time. I would no longer be alone, we’d be a couple, a pair of gods.
The present ritual foresees that God has a son, a descendant, but no consort, or companion or whatever, but you know what, the monotheistic religions would simply have to get over it.[33] And I may be worrying too much; the doctrine regarding me has always been quite vague and approximate, so that married or not married wouldn’t change much. Besides, there would be no need to broadcast the news to the four winds, we could just carry on discreetly for the moment. Slowly humans would begin to sniff out the fact that I was no longer alone, and then they’d have to catch up, bring the sacred texts up to date, redo the iconography and all. Taking their time.
Stop! I say to myself. You must cease thinking about that girl this instant! Whatever happens, you must forget her. And return to thinking about nothing, which in fact is the only way to think impartially about everything! I am God! I tell myself.
A TERRIBLE PLANETARY INJUSTICE
On her arrival at the lab, everyone gazes at her the way you do someone who’s just lost a close relative. But Daphne doesn’t notice. She slept only about half an hour under the larch trees but feels perfectly up to carrying out the bombardment she’s planned. They seem to have posted the results of the job search, mumbles her stoichiometric admirer, studying, as always, the shoes that stick out from under his smock, shoes a priest might wear on an outing. She listens as she would to a monumental bore, without noticing the intense glow of his phosphorescent pimples. Only after she has calmly fired off all the tiny golden bullets coated with modified genes does she go have a look. And learns that the clueless goose has won the prize. And that she has come second in the ranking. She thinks she must be dreaming, but no—she is second, and by many points. Her first thought goes to how she can save the microbe battery, the way you worry about how to protect a child.
Now as a rule the injustices of planet Earth leave me neither hot nor cold. And that’s not me being cynical, but merely simple good sense. To intervene would be like trying to plug all the holes in a colander as big as the globe.[34] But this time I’m indignant; enough is enough. It shouldn’t be terribly difficult to remedy the situation, though. I can visit a very aggressive type of leukemia on the lab director, one of those conditions that despite ample painkillers provokes harrowing screams and sends goosebumps up and down a whole hospital ward. Or better yet, I can snuff the fellow out in one go along with the charming appointee: a ceiling that collapses, a cylinder of oxygen that explodes, two souls united in job-search manipulation and in the hereafter. Now as I said, I usually abstain from such methods (so primitive), but sometimes a case needs special handling.
Finally, Daphne can’t fight anymore. Fatigue descends upon her, she feels it in her stocky calves, her skinny ribs, her too-long neck, her larger-than-normal brain. She thinks she’s never been so exhausted. Her colleagues try to convince her that maybe the money will turn up to renew her contract, but their words sound limp, motivated by the pity they feel for her. Even the chemist with acne seems resigned. He’s crying. At this point she decides to go home.
But her bike, rather than heading back to the old fishmonger’s, turns south toward the edge of town, then climbs the hills toward the flashy new villas of the nouveaux riches, and finally cuts down the scruffy valley inhabited by the leftover belligerents of 1968 and their followers. She gets to the parking lot (as it were) of her stepfather’s house (as it were), removes her helmet, and realizes she has no idea what to do next. It feels like she’s taken her head off. The neo-Buddhist drops the wheelbarrow he’s pushing toward the hayloft—or marijuana shed—and hastens to her side. He grabs an arm to hold her up, or rather he means to, but being clumsy he trips, making things worse. She is staring straight ahead, two eyes fixed like dead orbs in a wax figure. He pushes her inside the way you push a stubborn donkey.
Now she’s slumped on the broken-down sofa that the big, long-haired dog uses as a bed. The big dog is staring at his fellow canine with the short hair (who’s more with it than he is) as if to ask what the hell’s going on. Why doesn’t she move a muscle? Why isn’t she crying? It’s like when she was three and her mother suddenly died (for her, suddenly). Recalling, perhaps, that catastrophic time, our Don Quixote look-alike observes her closely, scratching the bald part of his head. He’d like to ask her something, but they’ve never, ever, spoken of serious matters, so it isn’t easy. But, giving his jaw a massage, he wonders aloud, what’s up? They gave it to the goose, she replies, her voice impersonal, on automatic. Then she falls silent again, and he also says nothing.
I’m God, however, and therefore I know what his synapses are up to. He’s thinking that the dapper lab director has a very fine automobile, and that these late-model vehicles make a gratifying blaze if you set fire to them, a lot of smoke and a terrible stink. Or else he could kidnap the man and stick pins in his scrotum; elite neoliberals are the worst specimens of the human race and the time has come to fight back. But then he looks at the altar with the fat fellow nude to the waist, and recalls his guru in India. It all goes toward building your karma, he thinks. Pins in the scrotum would be counterproductive.
He scratches his neck and ruminates. Some of these neoliberal sharks do deserve punishment, however, without necessarily going to extremes. A slightly less devastating version of the automotive hypothesis? He could rake the car’s metallic paint job up and down with a size fifteen nail. At times the mystic spark in him does battle with an insurrectionary anarchist tendency. Before he drifted East he’d been a member of a tiny sect that urged perpetual revolution. But in a subsequent spiritual wave, he’s decided that what happens in material life matters very little.
He brings her a beer and opens it. She drinks a sip or two, gazing at something invisible. He clears his throat loudly, the way you do when you think you have something important to say. He tells her that her mother (he calls her Gaia, that was her name) knew a priest who helped her when she was homeless, and with whom she used to have big discussions. He thinks Daphne ought to look him up. An imperceptible jolt runs through her, maybe just a mechanical reaction. She doesn’t seem to have understood. A guy connected with politicians and people who count, but he was also close to your mother, and he’ll certainly help you out too, he says in that unnatural voice, studying his slippers.
33
One more proof humans are intrinsically selfish; I see no reason why they should spend their days coupling, or thinking about coupling, while I may not even take a legitimate wife.
34
And mind you, (wo)men adore injustices. If I were to counter all the existing cruelties, they’d wrack their brains to come up with even more horrendous ones, even more ferocious. You can’t expect a hippopotamus to walk a tightrope, or a giraffe to fly.